Books about the Tejano/Mexicano experience have been booming lately. Here are five writers emblematic of the power in the literary voices of the Mexican-American community and their recognition in Texas and beyond.

All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches From the U.S. Borderlands, by Stephanie Elizondo Griest (University of North Carolina Press, $30), is a book split in two, much like the Tejana author from Corpus Christi. After years spent satisfying her wanderlust, Griest returns to the border to explore where she belongs, whether she belongs. Her searing first-person accounts explore the self and a linguistic heritage in part determined by how her mother was punished for speaking Spanish in Texas.

All the Agents and Saints, by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

(UNC Press)

In the second half of the book, Griest lives with the Akwesasne Mohawks of northern New York/Canada borderlands. Environmental destruction wounds both places, which undermines how a community can honor its traditions. Nepantla, the Aztec word for living in between worlds, replays itself as an indigenous community struggles to reinvigorate its shattered heritage amid violence and isolation, yet also with an indomitable spirit.

House Built on Ashes, by José Antonio Rodríguez (University of Oklahoma Press, $19.95), is a gorgeously written memoir about a childhood journey from abject poverty in Mexico to naturalized citizen in South Texas. Memory vignettes bring the reader to a young life where the only heat in the winter is another body next to it.

House Built on Ashes, by Jose Antonio Rodriguez

(University of Oklahoma Press)

A boy's poignant closeness to his mother helps when his sharp mind endures, but doesn't quite understand, homophobic slurs from classmates.

When the author recognizes how words matter uniquely to him, this separates him from his family. Yet when he finds himself at a university in New York, where he appreciates his small, heated room, he feels separate from others pursuing their doctorates. This year Rodríguez published his first poem in The New Yorker.

Beast Meridian, by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Noemi Press, $15), is full of poetry that speaks truth to power from the angle of vision and distortion that comes from being a first-generation xicana, as she identifies herself. She writes, "For the great violences hidden inside women, For the women hidden inside great violences." A beloved grandmother dies too young, from cervical cancer, yet also from the casual oppression suffered by unauthorized immigrants and from patriarchal norms.

Beast Meridian, by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal

(Noemi Press)

Through this trauma, the author becomes — or is made into — a rebel, juvenile delinquent, and even mental patient, as she fights against the forces faced by a young brown girl in the Rio Grande Valley. As she mourns, she seeks a new mythology in the stars:

find their names & the split will heal & return the land/ to that lineless open join hands with the invisible/ the disappeared the forgotten river flooding/ the land nourished the blooming mourning/ the return of the beasts

The fierce chants of this poet overturn erasure, resist assimilation, and possess wounds, through time, bodies and images, to transform them.

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (Clarion Books, $17.99), is yet another stellar young-adult novel by this prolific, PEN-Faulkner-Award-winning writer from El Paso. (These books are so necessary: years ago the state crossed an important threshold as Latinos became the majority of students in Texas public schools.)

The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, by Benjamin Alire Saenz

(Clarion Books)

A senior in high school, Salvador (Sal) Silva gets into fights and tries to understand whether this rage is genetic or something else. Sal's adoptive gay father, Vicente, along with Sal's best friend, Samantha (Sam), create a new loving family around the teen, even as tragedies strike them.

This first-person story cracks with sharp dialogue and pithy text messages between Sal and Sam. Sáenz's literary strengths are on full display: emotional characterizations are deep and complex, as the lives of Sal, Sam and Vicente revolve around the many questions of nurture vs. nature.

Joe Jiménez's Bloodline(Arte Público Press, $11.95) is a grittier — but no less necessary — story of teenage manhood. Written in lyrical, second-person prose, the San Antonio author's novel focuses on the haunting life and voice of 17-year-old Abraham (Abram). Abram, growing up in his grandmother's home after the death of his father and the abandonment by his mother, promises his girlfriend he'll stop fighting. Then macho and self-centered Uncle Claudio returns home to guide Abram into a more disciplined manhood.

Bloodline, by Joe Jimenez

(Arte Publico Press)

Is this an opportunity or a tragic mistake? The evocative words and emotions within Abram cut the reader deep.

A native of El Paso, Sergio Troncoso teaches at the Yale Writers' Conference and the Hudson Valley Writers' Center. He is the author of The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, and the novels The Nature of Truth and From This Wicked Patch of Dust. He serves as Secretary of the Texas Institute of Letters.